Online, we have plenty of ways to track visitor behavior. Tracking cookies, heat maps, click tracking, ad retargeting etc, but as soon as that person picks up the phone, we’re lost. But we don’t have to be.

Without call tracking, you have no idea what web pages that caller has visited. Therefore all of the effort you’ve put into designing user flows, and nurturing that lead when they’re online become all but nullified if they decide they want to connect with a real human being.

What is Call Tracking

Call tracking is a method of generating unique phone numbers to track the overall effectiveness of a campaign where the primary call to action involves your customer calling the business.

For example, if your marketing campaign consists of PPC, Tradeshows, and Radio Ads, each marketing channel is assigned a different phone number so you could measure both volume and quality of phone conversation.

Online, top call tracking services will assign each visitor a unique phone number (known as a legacy number) that will sync with the Google Analytics if dialed. When the visitor calls, you’re able to track what keywords they used to find you, measure the length of the call (to determine quality) and what pages they’ve viewed before & after the phone call takes place.

Compare this to the traditional method of well…wondering, it’s easy to understand how using call tracking enables you to have a more complete view of your marketing efforts, focus your budgeting, and tighten the screws on your overall marketing efforts.

Services like RingRevenue, Ifbyphone, Callfire, and Logmycalls, provide their own “legacy phone number” service along with their own unique features (like phone qualification surveys) to best suit your businesses needs.

How To Measure & Improve Your Phone Calls

Generally speaking, installing call tracking on your website is as easy as specifying call parameters within the app (e.g showing local numbers to local visitors) and inserting a snippet of Javascript.

Once the Java’s inserted on your site, you can configure most services to integrate with Google Analytics to track which pages a caller has visited and get a broad view of which pages generate the most calls. Setting the phone call as a conversion goal just like any other conversion goal.

Most services have their own detailed call dashboard, and some will also integrate CRMs like Salesforce or Hubspot to apply the call information to the rest of your prospect’s lead information, such as discovery keywords, customer journey, and call time.

A joint study between M.I.T and InsideSales.com states that your chances of even making contact with a phone lead drop 100% within the first five minutes of expressing interest & the odds of qualifying that lead decrease 6x after the first 60 minutes.

What this really means is that contacting your new lead should be measured in seconds and minutes, not hours or days.

By combining call tracking to see browsing behavior with a responsive power dialer like Inside Sales, you can contact your new lead almost immediately after they enter their information & know almost exactly what they’re interested in.

Call Tracking & Google Adwords

For experienced Adwords advertisers, this won’t be a major revelation, but back in 2011 Google introduced an Ad Extension called “Click To Call.”

What Click to Call does is displays your phone number as the primary call to action on a top sponsored result for whatever keyphrases you’re targeting.

For example an insurance agency could target the phrase “car insurance quotes” prompting the searcher to speak with an agent.According to Google “click to call” Adword campaigns see an average of 5-30% higher conversions than their typical “click here” Mobile counterparts.

Using a legacy phone number system like we were talking about before, you could generate multiple phone numbers to efficiently test things like which regions produce the best leads, 800 numbers vs local numbers, and of course, which copy produces the higher click through rates.

The best part about click to call (which you’ll see in the case studies below) is that it can be used at no additional cost. Considering that phone leads are typically more qualified than web leads, this makes for a much more effective use of ad dollars.

Case Studies

# 1 – Esurance Improves Mobile Traffic By 200%

Insurance company Esurance wanted to make good on their “Technology when you want it, people when you don’t” slogan.

By implementing Google’s Click To Call feature in Adwords, Esurance has been able to improve their mobile call volume by 200% year over year. By targeting mobile customers searching for “insurance quotes” or the like, Esurance is able to connect mobile searchers with a licensed insurance agent almost immediately after searching.

Doing this decreased their Cost Per Acquisition by 30% and tripled their mobile acquisition within the first year. Watch the video to see the case study

Combining Pay-Per-Call with relevant affiliate advertising offers from companies like AllState, ServiceMagic, DirecTV and more, Justin Elenburg was able to experience average conversion rates of 20% and receive payouts between $10-$30 for every call placed through the phone numbers he promoted.

His strategy was centered around using Google Adwords to target “need based” searches made on Mobile phones then having his tracking number be the primary call to action in the ad. In the example below, he provides a use case where a user might search “Phoenix Plumber” because their bedroom has been flooded by leaky pipes.

By being top bidder for the keyword “Phoenix Plumber”, he is able to display his tracking phone number as the top search result. So if the user clicks his tracking number and calls the plumber who then comes out, Justin get’s a commission, the plumber gets a customer, the customer get’s their pipes fixed, and everyone’s happy.

In this case study he says, “Once the upfront work is done, I can pretty much put the campaigns on auto-pilot and watch the calls and commissions come in.”

Inserted primary call to action (click-to-call) at top of page, and repeated 6 additional times.

Simplified the offer, and made it easier to understand

Assigned unique phone numbers to different landing pages

Integrated with Google Analytics to create a pageview once phone call reached a certain length

On that last bullet point, tracking the call length based on url & phone number would allow Ifbyphone to easily determine which pages/keyword targeting combinations would have the highest ROI.

If your company were running PPC campaigns that were segmented by geographic region, you could easily determine which geographic regions would have higher conversion rates using similar methodology, but more on that later.

Not being content & resting on their conversion rates, Ifbyphone came back to Closed Loop saying “we think we can do better.” and lifted all design restrictions.

Target Phone Numbers By Region On Landing Pages

One final trick I want to offer is that by using behavioral targeting techniques with Visual Website Optimizer, such as acknowledging the visitor’s geographic region, or referral site, you could see a dramatic increase in your call in conversions.
While not specifically about call tracking, Visual Website Optimizer was able to increase click throughs to their careers page by 149% by adding a small chicklet to the side of the page that acknowledged the visitor’s location.

With those kinds of numbers, it’s not difficult to imagine that adding additional relevance to a page saying something to the effect of “Free [offer] for [city, state] visitors, call [local number] to speak with a representive” would give a significant lift in conversion rates.

If your company is high volume phone sales, consider Inside Sales the industry leader in lead response managment to shorten the time between when someone fills out the lead form and when you get them on the phone.

Conclusion

If done well, closing the loop on phone call data provides robust information about your prospects that can influence every aspect of your online marketing strategy from discovery to lead nurture, final conversion, up-sales and beyond.

Responding quickly to inquiries with detailed knowledge about the prospect also better equips your sales person to answer any questions that may arise from the consultative sales conversation.

So my question to you is two-fold

From what you’ve read, what do you like about the call tracking process &

How would you use this in your own business to improve your conversions?

Looking forward to your responses, and if you liked this article, please share it.

16 Comments

MattMay 12, 2013 @ 18:15:58

Great Article Peep, very comprehensive as always. In your experience, when call data is collected in Google Analytics, can it be used to automatically optimise the campaign via goal conversions or is it still a manual process of making bidding adjustments based on your findings.

It’s great to see call tracking recognized as a powerful tool for tracking phone conversions.

I’m with CallRail (http://www.callrail.com) and we provide call tracking for thousands of businesses. Our platform offers tight integration with Google AdWords – you can track calls down to the keyword level and feed the data back to Google Adwords as conversions.

TaylorMay 15, 2013 @ 01:37:57

Fantastic article.

We’ve been using call tracking for 6 months now and it’s really helped us drill down on what the most compelling parts of our site are that drive people to call and also where visitors are coming from. We’re using Log My Calls though and it doesn’t seem to integrate with Google Analytics like you said.

Is anyone using a call tracking software that lets them see exactly which pages people that call came visited?

In order to track calls many organizations have their agents ask, “how did you hear of us?”. This information is somewhat useful but can be inaccurate. People might not remember or there may have been numerous touch points. This product eliminates that question.

Great article. I have a question. When I go to my Google Analytics profile and visit the admin section, it lets me set up Goals. The goal type options are Destination (which I usually use), Duration, Pages/Screens per visit, and Event. What I’m trying to figure out is whether there is some way of adding a tracking phone number to a web page (or direct mail, etc.), and then when someone calls that number, a Goal is triggered. If a goal was triggered, it would theoretically show up in the Multi Channel Funnel report. That’s my ultimate goal. Without phone calls showing up in the multi channel funnel report, I’m missing a big piece of my analytics. Is this doable? I talked to another company a few minutes ago and they said it’s impossible to do that. But I wanted to get a second opinion. Thanks!

First of all very nice post, this is a great in depth look at call tracking overall. I do want to ask your opinion on something though. Do you think businesses are reluctant to use call tracking in their marketing efforts because there is no clear pricing?

If you look at most of the top companies their is no clear pricing, and the ones that are are charging insane amounts. There is a company here in the UK charging over $150 us equivalent per month for their services and then charging almost .20 cents per minute. As a business owner how could I honestly say this is a good investment when across the pond, CallRail is charging $30 a month, and I get 10 local numbers and 500 minutes included?

While I understand that their are other business expenses for every company, Many of us know that getting a phone number costs nothing, and cost per minute for provisioned tracking numbers is even less.

I personally love call tracking and think that if you really want to know whats working for your business, it’s great, however I have spoke to many business owners who were sold overpriced packages, by companies that under delivered.

I know I’m on my soap box a bit, but I want business owners to understand the power of call tracking, but many of them see it as something that is still not in budget.

I think some of the bigger companies don’t do call tracking, because conceptually it’s difficult to understand. Figure, you’re dealing with a paradigm that has always dictated one phone number per entity, so when you say “NO WE HAVE UNLIMITED PHONE NUMBERS!” That in itself is a bit mind-blowing. Take it a step further and say “every unique visitor gets their own, AND it’s tied to their analytics data if they call” and now you’re just off into crazy la-la weirdo territory for many who make the budgeting decisions.

It’s much easier to hold on to the belief that the call channel can’t be tracked, than it is to believe there is a viable solution.

Now on the call tracking companies parts, its their job to not sound so (pardon the language) geeky when describing what call tracking is and how it works. It’s easy to get caught up in the details, but those details are very confusing. I know how and IVR is and how it works, and it’s still a little mind-bending to think about.

Honestly, I think it’s a matter of really focusing on the benefits while talking about the features a bit. Otherwise, it’s just scary to think about, and easier to hold on to old beliefs. Just my two cents :-)

Well done Tommy ! Great in depth look at call tracking and it’s benefits.

At nimbata (http://www.nimbata.com) we provide companies with call tracking solutions that may be used as stand-alone services or as an integrated offering. Our easy to use framework seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics providing actionable insights for our customers.